Monetize your Blog as an Online Course

Owning a blog is a must-have for every business and entrepreneur nowadays. Writing weekly articles to attract your audience and rank for SEO has become standard practice.

A blog can help increase your traffic, build an email list, keep your audience engaged and offer a PR boost. However, building up an email list and increasing your traffic does not always result in monetary earnings. What happens when you have established yourself or your business as the leader in your field, but your products fail to sell?

It’s probably time for some pivoting. What about all the content your audience loves to read? You can easily reuse your blogposts as an online course. We live in the age of information, and people are thirsty for knowledge. Elearning is a multi-billion dollar industry and the new trend in entrepreneurship is online training.

All it takes are five easy steps:

#1. Choose your course topic

While your blog might be general or have a broad theme, you can surely identify 3 or 4 main categories or themes repeating themselves. Choose one of them (or more if you are looking to create and sell more courses).

Can’t choose which theme to use or decide the title? Write a blog post about it asking your readers. As they are your main target group, it’s a good idea to test your hypothesis and see if they would be interested in a course.

Then, make a list of the most popular articles on the topic. Use Google Analytics to see which article performs better both as a landing page and in total pageviews and time on site. You are now halfway through your course’s content.

#2. Structure your thoughts

Creating a course curriculum will help you visualize the final product and guide you through the rest of the process. Plot the road ahead and it will look easier to achieve!

Make a table of contents by hand or using Word / Excel and write down your learning objectives. Think about it like a story. There is a beginning (introduction), multiple main parts (learning points) and an end (conclusion). Each one should convey a value proposition to your audience. And to make it easier, each one can be one or more of your blog posts.

Get the juicier and most valuable parts of your blog posts to add to each section. You can even include parts from your article’s references, links, videos etc. An online course does not need to be material that you created but also linking to important industry articles that you have researched and hand-picked for your students.

#3. Include visual content

Copying your blog articles as an online course will not work. The whole point of repurposing content is to change its form and provide a different value than the original. There are many formats you can use such as:

Video – Make your blog post into a script and present it through a camera. Be careful to use good quality equipment. Your laptop’s camera and microphone might not be the right ones for this job.

Audio – Camera shy? Just record your script with audio. You can also use the uncut versions of those recordings as podcasts or extra material.

Slides & Infographics – Even if you are not a great designer, you can use tools such as Piktochart to make infographics or a few more interesting slides for your presentations. People still love presentations and powerpoint slides, just keep them visual with supportive text.

Images, Graphs and Tables – Enhance your text with images and visualize the numbers in your texts with Graphs and Tables. That will make your course less boring and help your students retain information.

#4. Bonus – Increase your students’ engagement

You can also use other formats to engage your learners into a conversation and make them act inside the course. Engagement will increase satisfaction and satisfied users means better reviews and word of mouth marketing for you

Make it interactive – Provide a social aspect to your course. Use a platform that allows for comments or add quizzes and exams to engage your learners.

Assignments – It’s not about reading or watching videos and cool graphics. Ask your students to research, test their knowledge and send you back their work. This will increase interaction with the course and with you.

#5. Choose a platform and start selling

You have collected all your content, you have created your videos, images, pdfs and you have already written down some quizzes and assignments. It’s time to find the right course platform for you.

Depending on the type of your course, you will need a checklist to help your choose the right one for you. Learning Revolutions has a comprehensive checklist you can use. Here is a slimmed down version with 10 features you might need:

And now you are ready to start promoting your online course. You already have an audience, a mailing list and you have written an article to attract some interest. It’s time to send a few emails to your readers and post on social media about your new exciting ecourse. Be sure to offer some sweet offers for your readers, social media following and add your course to directories and your discount to coupon sites to attract your first students.

Online courses are a great way to repurpose your content and create a source of passive income. They can also improve your brand positioning as an expert in your field, bringing some extra clients to your company.

Did I miss something, or would you like to learn more about creating online courses? Leave your comment below and I will answer your questions!

Tweak Your Biz is a thought leader global publication and online business community. Today, it is part of the Small Biz Trends stable of websites and receives over 300,000 unique views per month. Would you like towrite for us?

An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.

Nick Malekos is the head Growth Marketer of LearnWorlds, the top all-in-one platform for creating and selling online courses. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry that doubles as a youth trainer and volunteers’ coordinator in his free time. https://www.learnworlds.com/

I hope my article helped to give you some ideas on how to start. What’s the link to your website/blog?

derbhiledromey

My blog is http://www.writerlyderv.wordpress.com. The idea of an online course is very new for me at the moment, and I may not use my blog as the basis for it, but I found your article helpful in general with regard to organising online courses.

Featured Author: Melissa Thompson

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